Food Of The Day…
Donuts!!
Ring doughnuts are formed either by joining the ends of a long, skinny piece of dough into a ring or by using a doughnut cutter, which simultaneously cuts the outside and inside shape, leaving a doughnut-shaped piece of dough and a doughnut hole from dough removed from the center. This smaller piece of dough can be cooked or re-added to the batch to make more doughnuts. A disk-shaped doughnut can also be stretched and pinched into a torus until the center breaks to form a hole. Alternatively, a doughnut depositor can be used to place a circle of liquid dough directly into the fryer. Doughnuts can be made from a yeast-based dough for raised doughnuts or a special type of cake batter. Yeast-raised doughnuts contain about 25% oil by weight, whereas cake doughnuts’ oil content is around 20%, but they have extra fat included in the batter before frying. Cake doughnuts are fried for about 90 seconds at approximately 190°C to 198°C, turning once. Yeast-raised doughnuts absorb more oil because they take longer to fry, about 150 seconds, at 182°C to 190°C. Cake doughnuts typically weigh between 24 g and 28 g, whereas yeast-raised doughnuts average 38g and are generally larger when finished.
Before the ring shape became common, doughnuts were often made as twisted ropes of dough. In the UK, doughnuts were always made into a ball. When cooked, they were injected with jam or jelly and always rolled in granulated sugar. This method is still in practice, but ring doughnuts are also now widely available. When placed into a pot of boiling fat, they floated until the lower half was cooked and then rolled themselves over to cook the other side. Ring doughnuts have to be flipped over by hand, which was more time-consuming. The twisted-rope type is called a cruller in some parts of the U.S., but cruller also refers to a particularly airy type of ring doughnut, usually glazed.
